Printing iPhone photos

As scrapbookers, I am sure you would agree that we have a tendency to take a lot of photos, probably more than the average Joe. With the marvellous invention of the camera phone, it has become even easier to take snapshots of our daily life, not just those special events or one-off occasions when you remembered to take your handheld camera.

Last week I was flicking through my Aperture library, smiling at the many photos of our darling 4 month old, and the many Hungry Heffy Crafts projects for the website, all taken with my DSLR. Suddenly I realised that the photos in my Aperture library were so very different to the ones on my iPhone. Due to its convenience, my iPhone library is packed full of sweet photos, snapped in the moment, which all tell a story about my every day life. Not just that, but because i have the Hipstamatic app for my iPhone, there are loads of really funky, stylised photos on my phone that i love.

I wanted to print some of these photos, but i hit a glitch. My iPhone is synced with my hubby’s account on the computer without Aperture and without photoshop. So i started thinking about an easy way to print the photos rather than spend countless hours uploading, transferring, editing, printing…. swapping from one application to the next!

First i thought i would just get them all printed through an online printer. So I spent time looking around, looking for competitive pricing, discount codes etc, but it turns out i have over 1200 iPhoto photos, and this was going to be pricey….maybe not.

Then, i found a fantastic solution.

I downloaded the Flickr app onto my iPhone, which enabled me to quickly and easily upload photos from my library to flickr. I did this over the course of two days, during the ad breaks when watching a show, or lying in bed, even whilst feeding the little one. It was quick and easy. It was perfect. I would recommend that you do this over wifi, for speed.

Next, i hopped over to snapfish (on the computer this time, rather than the phone). Snapfish works with flickr seamlessly, so i was able to click a button and my flickr set was transferred over to my snapfish account in a matter of minutes. woohoo!

Then i found the magic button that allows you to print the photos at home. The interface works really well, as you can choose the size of photos you want, and if you want to print multiples of one photo on a page, or fit a number of different photos onto the one page.

I wanted to keep my photos small rather than print them 4×6, and this method allowed me to do that (printing 8cm x 6cm), and they also let me print with a white border which was exactly the look i wanted.

Before long I had forty photos printed in a size i wanted, all the same size, on A4 printer photo paper, right there in my hands.

So tonight, i’m going to steal my hubby’s iPhone, download the flickr app, and print off some snapshots of his every day life.

I have no idea what I am going to do with the photos. Maybe some will make it onto a scrapbook page, maybe some will become a mini-book, and perhaps some will end up sitting in a drawer, but I am okay with that. After all, i firmly believe that although we take loads and loads of photos, we really don’t print enough. When was the last time you leafed through some photographs that didn’t involve scrolling with your mouse?